As a person who is more introverted than extroverted, growing up in a family with more extroverted than introverted people can cause a lot of misunderstandings, confusion, and even pain. Add to the mix, a variety of other beliefs that created further breeches in communications and connecting, becoming a people pleaser to be liked, accepted, and even to be safe, resulted in an impairment to developing healthy boundaries.

Don’t get me wrong, people like people pleasers, because well, people pleasers put their own needs, wants, and lives on the back-burner or even lock them away and instead do what other people want, which of course, is what the opposite unbalanced folks want.

No wonder these types of relationships manifest lose-lose scenarios.

Eventually a stand-off , quiet or not, will happen when the people pleaser reaches his or her tipping point. How the stand-off will happen also depends on the benefit reaper’s personality type, beliefs, conditioning, etc. The stand-off could be a silent parting of ways or with high drama, perhaps under the guise of current problem, but in reality a result of a series of problems created by the people-pleaser’s inability to say no due to his or her lack of healthy boundaries.

Personally and even professionally, to avoid the dramas, I often left because having unhealthy boundaries, I didn’t fully understand the problem and therefore, I couldn’t have the required conversations to turn the personal or professional relationships around or even make the parting ways respectful.

Of course, even if I had been able to have the required conversations, there was always the other person and their contribution, taking advantage, that raised a lot of negative emotions. Being compelled to face his or her own role in an unbalanced, unhealthy personal or professional relationship is not easy for someone used to taking advantage of other people. Embarrassment, guilt, and shame can morph into anger to save face by being caught out.

I know about being the other in such relationships because experience taught me a person had to be one or the other, though mostly I wore the people pleaser (heart) banner on my sleeve for those looking for people like me.

Call it what you will … a low Respect Level, low self-esteem, a belief other people are more valuable … the net result is the same … unbalanced, unhealthy relationships, always with a pending due date.

My personal and professional work to understand, heal, change, and grow beyond such limiting, unbalanced, and unhealthy relationships resulted in the development of Connecting The Dots With The Respect Principle, a philosophy and global initiative to foster the mentality everyone person is valuable … to be respected … simply for being a life, which is why I share articles such as Hailey Magee’s to help us all on our lifelong journey of learning to become the best version of ourselves.

As for my lifelong habit of leaving? Sometimes, leaving is still the respectful thing to do, but the drama I save for the arts.

Check out Hailey’s 9 Tips for ways to create healthier boundaries …

How to Set Better Boundaries: 9 Tips for People Pleasers by Hailey Magee for Tiny Buddha

“When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.”

“In the real world, life is filled with risks—financial, physical, emotional, social—and reasonable risks are essential for children’s healthy development.”

“Now our working assumption is that children cannot be trusted to find their way around tricky physical or social and emotional situations.”

“… watched as one by one the playgrounds in her neighborhood were transformed into sterile, boring places. Sandseter had written her master’s dissertation on young teens and their need for sensation and risk; she’d noticed that if they couldn’t feed that desire in some socially acceptable way, some would turn to more-reckless behavior. She wondered whether a similar dynamic might take hold among younger kids as playgrounds started to become safer and less interesting.”

“Children, she concluded, have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement; this doesn’t mean that what they do has to actually be dangerous, only that they feel they are taking a great risk. That scares them, but then they overcome the fear.”

“Even today, growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions … but if they never go through that process, the fear can turn into a phobia.”